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{Bookshelf Recommendation}
A Classic on What It Means to Be a Soldier
There are arguably two books every American citizen should read to understand our unique experiment in republican government: Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Federalist Papers. Similarly, there are arguably two books every American soldier should read: Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society and J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. Both books are written by soldiers who have studied the “art of war” (Sun Tzu—another great book well worth reading by soldiers). Of these two (three) books, it is Gray’s The Warriors that I want to particularly draw to your attention, because it is the one book on war that I have read and studied that touches the very marrow of what it means to be a soldier—a warrior.
Gray was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941 and discharged a second lieutenant in 1945. Engaged in counter-espionage and intel in Europe and North Africa, Gray spent many of his post-war years contemplating and studying the meaning of not only his own experiences as a soldier but of soldiers in general. The result of all his labors is The Warriors. It is a philosophically profound examination of the meaning of war and the nature of warriors informed by combat and the effects of combat. Rooted in “ground truths,” it confronts us with the rationale and rationalization of soldiers as they experience combat and try to make sense of it all. As the book’s epigraph by the British parliamentarian and essayist Norman Angell observes, “It is quite in keeping with man’s curious intellectual history that the simplest and most important questions are those he asks least often.” Gray does us a great service by asking precisely such questions, and offering some important insights regarding the possible answers along the way. In my many years of teaching, the book has proven of interest to every serious student confronting the meaning of war first raised in Homer’s Iliad (another work every soldier would do well to read; Alexander the Great died with a copy of it under his pillow). As soldiers, we have a duty to be serious about our profession of arms, and Gray offers us one of the most important examinations thereof.
Dr. Rouven Steeves, Lt. Col, U.S. Air Force, is a member of the senior military faculty at the USAF Academy in Colorado where he is an associate professor of humanities and political science. Views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the McConnell Center.